Having bravely held a mirror up to his past in such novels as The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy returns to strip mine the South Carolina of his childhood in his big new novel, Beach Music.

If Conroy is willing to risk basing professional success on personal misery, others are not. His sisters no longer speak to him. Undaunted, Conroy dedicates the novel to his brothers, including a younger brother who recently committed suicide. Apparently, it is only through fiction, through the telling of tales, that Conroy can make sense of a brutal childhood.

This time out, Conroy's first-person narrator and alter ego is Jack McCall, a figure much like the wise-cracking, damaged Tom Wingo of The Prince of Tides. Jack has exiled himself and his young daughter Leah to Rome after his wife, Shyla, commits suicide. In an effort to protect Leah, he lies to her.

"Because I inherited my family's gift for storytelling, my well-told lies became Leah's memories. The South I described...existed only in my imagination. It admitted no signs of danger or nightmare."

This is the hazard of stories - they blur the line between the real and the ideal. And from the safe distance of Rome, Jack can no longer tell the difference.

But the South beckons to Jack just as it always does to Conroy. When Jack's mother, the inimitable Lucy, is stricken with cancer, he returns home to South Carolina, to reconcile himself and his daughter with the past.

In effortless fashion, Conroy presents a mysterious suicide, cancer, a motherless daughter and a wounded father. Make yourself comfortable. It's only the beginning. Beach Music also takes you through the Holocaust and the Vietnam War. Jack's not just whistling Dixie when he tells his daughter, "Something terrible happens in every life.

Even one of the stories contained here would have been worthy of a novel, but Conroy enjoys taking a broad sweep, throwing the secrets of a whole town at you, like a patient in a psychiatrist's office anxious to make the most of his 50 minutes. All this unburdening creates a novel that can stultify as much as it satisfies.

Conroy realizes this and even makes fun of his fondness for wretched narrative excess. One of Jack's brothers describes the whole McCall saga as: "Bad movie. Lousy script. Poor location. Ham actors. Hack directors. But melodrama up the old wazoo."

Melodrama calls for powerful characters, and Conroy does not disappoint, from the beautiful Lucy McCall, a survivor without a shard of bitterness, to Jordan, Jack's childhood friend, who has been in hiding since Vietnam.

This is Conroy's most ambitious work to date. It's epic, and appropriately enough, every one of its too many characters is larger than life. It's like entering the land of the giants.

The only character who rings false is Jack's daughter. Jack makes much about how he has shielded 7-year old Leah from his poisonous past. She is a "magical child," yet there is nothing of the child in her speech.

"I'll paint some pictures," she says. "Would you like that? I'll paint some pictures," she says. "Would you like that? I'll paint a picture of the Piazza Faresse in Rome."

Leah, the youngest McCall, is supposed to present hope for the future, and though she is likeable, she becomes an unbelievable character. Perhaps the author can't quite figure how to depict a well-adjusted personality.

Conroy presents the McCall family in all their horror and glory - both of which are reflected in the author's style.

In grandiose passages, Conroy's sentences become indecipherable. But when he can quiet down and simplify, his writing sings. Describing the strange, ambivalent ties of family, he writes: "I could always find rescue in the country of brothers."

Telling stories is how the McCalls survive; it is how Conroy survives. The problem is that in Beach Music, the author can't stop telling stories. Hundreds of them. These stories, which are supposed to weave themselves into an enormous fabric of pain, yearning and redemption, more often resemble a lavish, lovingly rendered crazy quilt.

Saving Beach Music is Conroy's own bigheartedness. His love of a people and a place bestow on the book an enduring grace.